The Master Rogue: The Confessions of a Croesus - David Graham Phillips

McClure, Phillips & Co.
New York
1903

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

“The Razor cut me, and dropped to the floor”	[ Frontispiece]
	Facing Page
“‘Don’t get apoplectic,’ he said, calmly; ‘you know you stole your start’”	[ 39]
“‘You liar! you forger!’”	[ 73]
“‘Not to have told you would have been a lie’”	[ 119]
“‘You will marry on the sixteenth of April, at noon. Get yourself ready’”	[ 129]
“I came upon Helen, sitting in the alcove, sobbing”	[ 218]

THE MASTER ROGUE

I

I cannot remember the time when I was not absolutely certain that I would be a millionaire. And I had not been a week in the big wholesale dry-goods house in Worth Street in which I made my New York start, before I looked round and said to myself: “I shall be sole proprietor here some day.”

Probably clerks dream the same thing every day in every establishment on earth—but I didn’t dream; I knew. From earliest boyhood I had seen that the millionaire was the only citizen universally envied, honoured, and looked up to. I wanted to be in the first class, and I knew I had only to stick to my ambition and to think of nothing else and to let nothing stand in the way of it. There are so few men capable of forming a definite, serious purpose, and of persisting in it, that those who are find the road almost empty before they have gone far.

By the time I was thirty-three years old I had arrived at the place where the crowd is pretty well thinned out. I was what is called a successful man. I was general manager of the dry-goods house at ten thousand a year—a huge salary for those days. I had nearly sixty thousand dollars put by in gilt-edged securities. I had built a valuable reputation for knowing my business and keeping my word. I owned a twenty-five-foot brownstone house in a side street not far from Madison Avenue, and in it I had a comfortable, happy, old-fashioned home. At thirty-two I had gone back to my native town to marry a girl there, one of those women who have ambition beyond gadding all the time and spending every cent their husbands earn, and who know how to make home attractive to husband and children.